Off Color: Kristina Wong (Video Series)

Video

The performance artist Kristina Wong says that marrying herself and stalking the basketball star Jeremy Lin offer opportunities to entertain as well as to question stereotypes about race and gender.Published OnOct. 27, 2014CreditImage by Channon Hodge/The New York Times

Off Color, a video series, highlights artists of color who use humor to make smart social statements about the sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways that race plays out in America today.

Dating in Los Angeles is not easy. Just ask Kristina Wong, a Chinese-American performance artist and writer who says she wants reparations for “yellow fever,” a common term for the fetishization of Asian women by white men. “Even in high school or middle school there would be white boys saying I like dating Asian girls because they’re more quiet and submissive and sweet,” Ms. Wong said in an interview. “It’s like they’re unable to acknowledge that there is something going on and there’s a specific reason they are dating all these women as if they were interchangeable.”

Through a combination of writing, speeches and performance art veering from campy to avant-garde, much of Ms. Wong’s work has tried to break racial, cultural and gender stereotypes.

“A general perception of Asians is, in America, we’re passive. We’re not going to rock the boat even when it’s well within our right to do so,” she said. “Asians should speak out – say something – stand up against injustice – just say something.”

Asian women aren’t alone in being stereotyped, Ms. Wong said. Asian men are often seen as emasculated in mainstream American culture. To “re-emasculate Asian men,” as she put it, she created a pseudo-obsession with the basketball player Jeremy Lin, including an online campaign to raise money for their wedding. Ms. Wong described the project as “a self-satirizing critique of fandom, class and access, racial stereotypes, gender and the institution of marriage.”

Ms. Wong’s work as an artist and performer is a far cry from her parents’ expectations, which she described in a speech to U.C.L.A. graduates this summer as “1. Doctor. 2. Doctor. 3. Physician.” But she would still be open to marrying one, she added.

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